The team at Igor’s Lab thinks it has identified the cause of occurrences involving power adapters that come packaged with Nvidia’s new RTX 4090 graphics card, which Nvidia is still looking into. The quad 8-pin to 16-pin adaptor that Nvidia sells, not the 12VHPWR connection itself, is the problem, the article claims. Particularly, whoever made the adaptor did a terrible job of soldering.
The crew investigated further and found that there are four 14 gauge wires scattered over a total of six connectors (each outer contact is tied to one wire, and the two inner contacts each have two wires soldered to them).
Igor said, “The solder base is a tiny copper base of only 0.2 mm thickness with a diameter of 2 mm per incoming wire, resulting in 4 mm per pair for the middle connections. The thin plate will immediately tear when the enclosing layer is gently removed due to its extreme fragility. Similar damage could result from the wires being bent at the connector, which is a simple mistake to make when connecting or unplugging them during routine installation or removal.
The problem has been brought up with Nvidia, and Igor’s Lab feels that at this point, the least the GPU manufacturer can do for its consumers is to recall the adapter.
According to the information they have provided and the damage complaints that have come to light thus far, it would probably be advisable to stop using the Nvidia-supplied adapter and switch to a reliable third-party alternative. You should, at the very least, prevent the adapter from being bent uncomfortably close to the connecting points and from being pushed awkwardly up against a side panel.
